Better Days Will Come Again by Travis Atria

Author:Travis Atria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-10-07T14:42:57+00:00

27

“All the [bad] musicians had faded out of the picture in Paris entirely.”1

—Arthur Briggs

ARTHUR BRIGGS SOLDIERED ON. IN February 1935, he met the great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, whom he had admired from afar since Hawk’s early recordings with Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s. Now Hawkins was pushing the boundaries of swing music, defining the tenor saxophone as a star vehicle in jazz. Of all the superlatives attached to Hawkins’s name, perhaps most important is the nickname given by his fellow musicians: Bean, short for Beano, short for B and O, short for Best and Only.

Hawkins was invited to Paris to perform for the Hot Club, which had just started the seminal jazz magazine Jazz Hot (today it is the oldest jazz magazine in the world and is still publishing on the Internet). With a few days to kill in Paris, he went to the Sweet and Hard Club to watch Briggs’s band perform. One night, he joined the band onstage and played a version of “Sweet Sue” that lasted an hour and a half. “He must have blown about forty choruses on his own,” Grappelli recalled.2

Briggs loved Hawkins from the start. “We got along so nicely together,” he said. “He was such a wonderful person.” Like Briggs, Hawkins was mild-mannered and good-natured. Like Briggs, Hawkins had a sharp sense of style. “He would think of his shoes, his socks,” Briggs recalled. “I remember him paying $20, $30 for a pair of stockings, socks. He was crazy about beautiful shirts, not eccentric shirts, but beautiful quality cashmere, silk. That’s where he would spend his money, and he would talk all day about his dress. He would dress like a prince, you know, he was always well dressed and thought the world of himself and he did have his mustache. . . . Yeah, he would always think of his mustache, cut ’em and trim ’em himself.”3

On February 23, the Hot Club brought Hawkins and Briggs together at the Salle Pleyel, a vast, gorgeous concert hall in Paris. Panassié worried about staging the concert in such a large hall, both for the quality of the sound and for the Hot Club’s ability to fill it, but he decided there was no other way to introduce the music and the magazine to the world. He was right to worry; the music was a near disaster. To Briggs’s dismay, the Hot Club had foisted a handful of young players on him at the last minute. These kids were as arrogant as they were mediocre, and Briggs spent most of the first set nervously watching as they commandeered the show. “At one point we were there, Hawkins and I, with our instruments in our hands, watching them to find out what was going on,” Briggs said. “The concert was no longer ours but theirs.”4

At intermission, while Grappelli chewed out the young Turks, Hawkins threatened to quit. “That’s enough,” he told Briggs. “Let’s go now!” Briggs calmed him down, and the second half went as planned, garnering a standing ovation.

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